Flock Safety cameras are immoral and insulting

Over the last few years, you may have noticed some new pieces of infrastructure on the side of the road. They’re tall black poles with a small solar panel mounted on top and a little camera box slung off the side. They’re not particularly noticeable, intentionally designed to blend in with the rest of the street furniture that adorns the side of American roads.

But once you know what they are, you start noticing them everywhere.

These are Flock Safety's infamous cameras, and they’re relying on you being unaware of what they’re doing, because these are not ordinary cameras.

Their purpose is not to monitor traffic or to support some civil engineer’s vain attempt at fixing traffic with more lanes (this time it’ll work, I’m sure). These cameras are license plate readers (LPR). They use an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to pull license plate numbers and identifying details — such as dents, stickers or accessories — off any car unfortunate enough to pass by them.

Their entire purpose is to track individual citizens, sharing location data with contracted police departments. They’re a nightmare for privacy and a dumpster fire for your rights.

While they are billed as a solution to increase police efficiency in catching “criminals,” they track everyone. It doesn’t matter if there is an active warrant or just some cop with a power trip; these cameras enable it. There even have been recorded instances of the cameras being used to stalk people. To put it lightly, they’re a massive overreach.

Anyone, absolutely anyone, can be tracked by these cameras. They record your location and send it to the police. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; they track you anyway. No warrants, no accountability.

Frankly, that’s unacceptable. The government having the ability to track you for any reason is a horrible idea. It doesn’t matter if you’re not breaking the law right now; this is the infrastructure, the bedrock, for a police state. They’re an enforcement mechanism made to allow any government to criminalize anything it wants.

These cameras have been accessed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. While the company, the CEO in particular, has repeatedly insisted that no federal agency has “direct” access to their system, that has not stopped federal agents from gaining access to the massive network of surveillance cameras. Primarily achieved through smaller-scale collaborations with the local police departments who actually operate the cameras, the end result is the same. Federal agents have been able to track people without a warrant.

In this age of masked thugs patrolling the streets, I don’t feel particularly comfortable with federal agents being able to track me on a whim if they happen to disagree with something I’ve said.

These systems really have no place in this country, no place here in Oxford.

The company brags about having over 12,ooo partnerships with various companies, organizations and police forces. While they refuse to publicly share locations, there is an open-source movement locating and mapping as many of the cameras as possible.

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An organization called DeFlock has released a map that pinpoints the location of over 83,000 of these cameras in the U.S. There are at least eight in Oxford alone, covering all major avenues into the city and Miami University, with two on US-27, one on Oxford Trenton Road and a handful more scattered around the paths in and out of town, tracking students and community members alike.

In addition, with a standard bit of venture capital-funded, tech company garbage, these cameras aren’t even secure. They are cheap hardware and low quality software built quickly to power the company’s unsustainably fast growth and high demand. The cameras themselves are even being leased to organizations via a subscription service, remaining owned by Flock Safety themselves, because even the police state isn’t safe from subscriptions, I guess.

Many of these cameras have even been exposed to the internet, so anyone with basic computer knowledge — which, in this case, is just clicking the right links and searching the right things — can access thousands of public surveillance cameras across the United States.

Not only are these cameras purposely built to enable an authoritarian regime to track anyone they disagree with, but they’re also horrendously insecure to the point that it’s insulting. It’s a system built on fear; little black cameras designed to menace people into obeying, all in the name of nondescript “public safety.” Even the name of the company is an insult, trying to make us part of their “flock,” like we’re some kind of sheep.

They’re trying to be intimidating, using poorly coded software and poorly designed hardware. To reference “1984” by George Orwell, they would love to be Big Brother, but their systems suck.

I’d rather this technology simply not exist, but for now, at least I can laugh at their sheer incompetence.

babbce@miamioh.edu

Charley Babb is a sophomore majoring in professional writing. He is an Opinion writer for The Miami Student, and he is active as a fencer in the Miami Medieval Club. He likes reading and creative writing in his free time.